I write speculative fiction that takes the engineering seriously... not for the hardware itself, but because the details are what the argument rests on. A laser link that drops out when it rains in Uganda. Cigarette smoke behaving wrongly in low gravity. The specific piece of paperwork that let a thing happen. The three novels share a preoccupation rather than a universe. Each one is about an institution that solved the problem in front of it and could not see the one it was making. The images below are cover concepts, not published editions. --- ## Beneath a Serpent Sky  Novel · Literary fiction with speculative elements · Brixham, Devon, 2097 When a comet threatens Earth in 2032, humanity's secret nuclear defence succeeds... but it condemns a coastal town to sixty-five years of perpetual rain. Sixty-five years later, an elderly man returns to Brixham to prove what really happened that night. The deeper he digs into the conspiracy, the less he can trust the one person helping him uncover it: his own brother. A book about what the truth costs the person carrying it, and about a town that was written off in a room its residents were never told about. Complete manuscript. Not currently represented. --- ## The Silent Ascent  Novel · Literary science fiction · Uganda, low Earth orbit, and the Moon, 1984 A shadow consortium called The Chrysalis Group has been running a private space programme for forty years, hidden from both Cold War superpowers. Elena Vance, nineteen and a geology prodigy, is recruited to take her missing father's place on a three-month rotation at a secret lunar colony. The mining operation is a front. Chrysalis is building a mass driver to deflect an asteroid... and the Soviet Union has detected the heat signature and read it as an American weapon. Cassette futurism: 1984 as it was actually built, in ferrite core and telex and hand-ground optics. Manuscript in development, close to complete. --- ## Red Dust  Novel · Literary science fiction · Jezero City, Mars, 2026 Kitty Rehn, seventeen, arrives on Mars to work the mineral fields and outrun the grief of her mother's death in a rover crash back on Earth. She finds a colony run like a company town, where the only freedom is an illegal racing circuit across the wastelands. When she finds evidence that the mining is destabilising the colony's own geology, the circuit becomes the only communication network outside corporate surveillance. Standalone, set in the same universe as *The Silent Ascent*, forty-two years later. In development. --- ## On the engineering The day job is safety-critical systems, so I am not guessing at this. When a spacecraft in one of these books vents, it vents for a reason I can defend. When a safety case gets signed, the meeting reads like meetings I have sat in. That is not about quality... it is about a texture that is hard to fake, and getting harder to find: how consequential decisions actually get made, by tired people, with incomplete information, on a date somebody already promised a customer. --- ## Enquiries For representation, rights, or editorial enquiries about any of the above, [get in touch](/contact).